Revisiting Carbonite

About a month ago I was talking about my system crash and getting my system back up to speed, and one of the reasons that I was able to bring my system back as quickly as I did was the fact that I had been backing up using a service called Carbonite.  This is very reasonable service, $49.95 per year for unlimited storage, had taken about a week to get most of my files that I needed backed up uploaded to their service.  When I restored from their site it only took a couple of hours for the data that I needed to be reinstalled on my machine.  It's great to see something worked as advertised.  The one drawback that I see with this service is that it does not include attached Storage Devices, like my network hard drive and it's piggybacked USB hard drive.  I can understand why they have not included that this price since if they did I would be able to map any drive on my network and back up its content as well.  Since the license is for individual workstations this cannot be allowed.  Their work around when I called their tech support is to copy the files I want backed up on to my computers local drive and then back up from there.  There is one problem with that, if you remove a file from your hard drive that is marked as a backup file then after 30 days of its being gone from your system it will be deleted from their system.  This prevents you from archiving and creating more space on your hard drive and using them as offline storage.

So if you're thinking of using this service then keep in mind what it was designed for.  The $49.95 yearly fee covers active file backup for one machine of its internally attached hard drives.  The service will not support USB or firewire attached storage or a backup of any files are located on this machine.